A couple of months ago I was in Seaside Heights, NJ, protesting the MTV reality show Jersey Shore with the New Jersey chapter of the Italian-American service organization UNICO National. Surprisingly, the protest went off with out a hitch. With the exception of a couple of mooks who got stabbed in a nearby alley, there wasn’t any sort of violent fallout. It was disappointing. Usually UNICO National protests ends when someone gets kidnapped, tied to a chair, covered in gasoline, loses some digits, gets strangled and then capped twice in the head for good measure… but they can’t all be as much fun as 2003’s protest of Jeff Foxworthy’s controversial use of the term “greasy wop dego mother-fucker” when referring to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.On the way back from the protest, I stopped at the Wawa in Toms River, hoping to score a turkey sandwich. I started ordering the sandwich using their sophisticated computer ordering system when I noticed that the employee in the deli looked suspicious. He wore a straw hat and a Hawaiian shirt in addition to some pretty conspicuous looking sunglasses to wear while indoors. I asked the man if there were any Kaiser rolls and he replied, in Spanish, that he did not speak English, but in the phoniest accent I’d ever heard. I asked him if he was wearing a fake nose and that’s when he took of the hat, glasses and fake nose to reveal that he was legendary comedy actor Bill Murray.
“Do you work here?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I stopped in for a BLT and there was nobody in here, so I decided to make it myself.”
“Oh.” I said. We looked at each other for a minute, “and the disguise?”
“What disguise?”
“Nevermind. You know, you can finish the BLT, don’t mind me.”
“I don’t really know how to make one,” he said.
“Really?”
“Well… I’m tripping balls right now. I started making the BLT, but then I couldn’t remember what the ‘B’ stood for.”
“Bacon?”
“Ohhhhh… bacon, right.” He said. “For a minute I thought it was Bratislava, which I think I thought was some sort of coleslaw product.”
“Is that a place?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Is it?”
“Yeah…” I said, contemplating for a moment how I wouldn’t be getting my sandwich. “Listen, do you want to, like, smoke a bowl?”
“Well yeah, let’s light that motherfucker up!”
I locked the doors to the Wawa and we smoked right there in the store. We tried to find the sound system that pumped the endless stream of contemporary hits through the store speakers, but in the process Bill accidentally locked himself in the freezer and had to push his way out, or as he described it: “going Godzilla” on the dairy section.
After Bill extracted himself from the freezer, we decided to just smoke and put up with the music. We sat on the floor of one of the aisles alternating between smoking bowls and devouring bags of Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips. We started to talk about his movies, but Bill was very evasive regarding the subject.
“You know,” he finally said, “it wasn’t even me in Caddyshack.”
“What are you talking about? That’s one of your best movies.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“Then who was it?” I asked.
“It was my identical twin brother Eduardo.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, man.”
“No, see, right after filming Meatballs I had a tragic revolving door accident and went into a coma for several years,” he told me.
“What’s a revolving door accident like?”
“Well, use your imagination. Did you know that revolving doors are the most dangerous type of door ever invented?”
“Oh shit, really?”
“No, I’m making that up… but they might be. I don’t know. What kind of door could be more dangerous?”
“Trap doors, maybe,” I said.
Bill pointed at me, “good thinking. You’ve thought of this before, haven’t you?”
“So you’re serious: you were in a coma and it wasn’t you in Caddyshack?”
“Yeah dude. I wouldn’t have worked with Chevy Chase anyway.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“He stole my pet rock when he came back to SNL as a host.”
“…it’s just a rock though, right?”
“You just don’t understand the 70s,” he said.
“So when did you wake up from the coma?”
“I think it was about mid way through the filming of What About Bob?”
“And that’s fine with Eduardo?”
“Funny story: a week before I woke up from the coma, Eduardo died in a freak accident. Frank Oz was throwing a fucking fit since, you know, they couldn’t finish it without him. Originally, Richard Dreyfus offered to double as both the role of Bob and Dr. Marvin. They started re-shooting it that way, but it was so god-awful that they were about to scrap the whole project. Luckily I came out of the coma about that time.”
“That’s funny?” I asked.
“Well I guess you had to be there.”
“What happened to Eduardo, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“You know those signs on the subway that tell you not to pass between cars while the train is moving?”
“I know them!” I shouted and then quieted down, “oh… sorry.”
“That’s alright,” he said, helping himself to a pint of Cookies and Cream. “He was probably the least favorite of my brothers… well, after Joel.”
“This shit is beat,” I told him, tapping the ash out of the piece.
We continued to eat all the junk food we could get our hands on until an employee emerged from the back of the store. Bill and I looked at each other, shocked. The employee stopped in his tracks as soon as he saw the mess we had made.
“Who are you people?” the employee asked. “Where’s Marty?”
Bill got up, as if he was about to say something important, but instead threw the remnants of his bag of honey-mustard and onion pretzel bites in the employee’s face. He shrieked as the flavoring burned into his retinas.
“Run!” Bill yelled in my direction.
I sprinted out of the front door and then took a moment to look back. Bill was emptying the register. Before he got to the front door, the employee got up. Bill pelted him with soft pretzels until he was once again knocked down. I made my way to my car and started it up. I pulled out of the parking spot, ready to go at any moment, and looked back at Bill one final time. He ran out the front door holding many more bags of beef jerky than he could possibly carry. As he ran, the beef jerky bags fell to the ground one by one. I honked twice, hoping to alert Bill to my getaway vehicle, but he just kept running.
After putting some distance between me and the Wawa, I decided to cruise around Toms River for a while to see if I could find Bill. I couldn’t. After a half hour I gave up my search and decided to head home.
And that was the time that me and Bill Murray hot-boxed/robbed the Wawa in Toms River, New Jersey.
